Be Your First Customer

“I can’t be the only person experiencing this problem…” That’s what Wes Pendleton, Founder of Soul Surplus, said to himself in the throes of a losing battle over a vintage R&B sample. That feeling planted the seed that would ripen into a fantastically successful full-service production company. But it all started because he felt a pain that he figured, “Surely others like me feel this way, too.”

One of the most under-appreciated assets a company or individual owns is its knowledge of what stinks, both for itself in its own operations, and also for its customers. It was this self-“stinks”-awareness that fueled Amazon’s conviction to expand AWS into a full-fledged offering at a particularly inopportune moment: they were fighting fires on multiple other fronts. As Brad Stone recounts in his excellent The Everything Store,

“Jassy, Bezos, and Dalzell presented the plan for the new AWS to the Amazon board, and the institutional no can close to rearing its ugly head. John Doerr, expressing what he would later call a ‘healthy skepticism,’ asked the obvious question: At a time when Amazon was having difficulty hiring engineers and needed to accelerate international expansion, ‘Why would we go into this business?’

‘Because we need it as well,’ Bezos replied, suggesting that Amazon’s demand for such a service reflected the broader market need. Jassy remembers Doerr telling him after the meeting that he was lucky to work at a company that would invest in something so daring.”

What is the problem you’re convinced others must experience, too? What have you created to solve your own needs, or are scaling up internally to meet your growing demand? Chances are, others need it, too.

There’s your next product. Better yet, there’s your next business. All too often, internal project leaders treating the organization as the “total addressable market.” Instead, they should see the organization as the first customer. Often, this paradigm shift opens you up to a market much bigger than the one the existing business is currently serving.

But it requires a radical mindset shift, from “project mindset” to “product mindset.” You might have never thought of selling it as a product. You might fear that it would be giving away your “secret sauce.” Such a shift requires being willing to reinvent yourself and your organization.

But the market values different kinds of revenue differently, and such innovations are often multiple-expanding opportunities. Just look at what Shantanu Narayen has done at Adobe. If your goal is maximizing shareholder value, sometimes the best thing you can do is start an entirely new business, built on the insights your current business have given you on the market.

Related: What Stinks?

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